18 pages • 36 minutes read
Rage HezekiahOn Anger
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Function of Anger
The thematic heart of this poem is a dialectic, or tension, between two opposing perspectives on the function of anger: one rooted in white psychological practices and the other rooted in radical Black activism. Therapists often teach clients that anger is a harmful, negative emotion that should be purged. The Black Power and Womanist Movements offer a counternarrative: Anger is necessary for the transformation of society into a just and equitable world.
The political is personal for Hezekiah; rather than a discursive treatise on the two perspectives (as the title “On Anger” might imply), she focuses the larger ideas through the lens of a therapy session. The white therapist represents the practice of American psychology, and the speaker offers a metaphorical look at how anger structures an identity based in resistance.
Most modern American psychological practices are rooted in German and Austrian—white—male scholarship. Wilhelm Wundt is considered to be the founder of experimental psychology, and Sigmund Freud is the most famous psychoanalyst. The specific practices used in this poem—creating notecards and letters—can be identified as a form of writing therapy, which was codified by white Texan James Pennebaker in the 1980s.
Additionally, the burning of the speaker’s letters can be connected to bra-burning, a symbol of white feminism. The therapist uses practices that stem from white academic men and a white feminist movement focused on biological differences in her sessions with a Black woman. This stands in contrast with how Black culture views anger and how Black women are treated differently than white women.
Anger in the Womanist and Black Power traditions is considered necessary for social change. Audre Lorde, a Black queer writer also publishing in the 1980s, says “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”; this speaks to the need for practices outside of white culture to destroy white supremacy and heal Black communities.
In Hezekiah’s poem, the speaker believes that righteous anger protects her from within. She writes, “anger, / my armor,” which not only defines anger as a protective covering, but also utilizes alliteration and slant rhyme (-er/-or) to align the two words. Furthermore, this “armor” is “embedded in the marrow” rather than worn like clothing. Anger is almost a genetic legacy passed down through eras of Black struggle and resistance.
Internal Identity Formation
The speaker in Hezekiah’s poem is interested in identity, “who [she] is.” Part of the desire to balance or belong to two different worlds—white and Black—may stem from the fact that the poet has a diverse racial background, as indicated by her inclusion in the anthology Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out. In this reading, the white therapist might represent not only the white psychology field, but also one part of the poet’s family that is at odds with another.
Furthermore, evoking “marrow”—bone tissue where blood cells form—speaks to the history of blood quantum in America after the institution of slavery. The one-drop rule was used to oppress those with diverse racial backgrounds, usually descendants of slaves, who might be able to pass for white. The internal, unseeable nature of bone marrow speaks to a deep cultural Black identity, one that has needed anger in order to combat enslavement and post-slavery prejudice.
This sense of self being centered in the bone stands in contrast with white philosophical and psychological ideas that center the self in the mind. Descartes said, “I think therefore I am,” which summarizes his ideas about the split between the body and the mind. Hezekiah’s poem offers an alternative embodied perspective, one rooted not only in external physical characteristics but also in internal, emotional, and generational characteristics.
External Loss of Self
The therapist externally defines, and suggests ritually destroying, part of the speaker’s self. Italicized language in the poem, phrases like “edge,” “Strength of Willful Negative Focus,” introduces alternative ways of describing anger. The “Negative” connotations here not only lose a positive, and specifically Black, lineage of anger, but also fuel the therapist’s plan for the speaker to release these feelings.
The act of burning letters causes the speaker to confess her attachment to anger as well as to describe the pain of loss. The paradox of fire and water—the therapist’s fireplace and the “gutted fish” of the speaker’s imagination—is used to explore how it feels to be asked to give up part of one’s self. While the letters filled with “resentments” have to be surrendered to the fire, the emotional weight of this act feels like “surrender[ing]” to a fisherman’s knife.
The feeling of loss is a form of death in both the fiery and watery aspects. These aspects can be connected through the common use of fire on fish after it is “gutted”: a cooking flame. However, the stronger paradox is that while the presence of the element of fire destroys the speaker’s epistolary words (the words she wrote in her letter), the absence of the water—as much as the fisherman’s knife—kills the fish.
